Post
by Earth » 19 Jan 2011 00:10
There have been a lot of discussion about triggers and clients and such, so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cc worth of discussion.
Most know that I'm quite advanced in my knowledge of scripting, and actually I have an extensive herbing set of triggers and such. I admit that I have spent hours and hours developing my triggers. In my mind, I relate developing these triggers as OOC "quests" to be solved, where there is a long term benefit to my investment in time.
The admin has acknowledged that triggers and clients are ok, as long as you are aware of your character. Just like quests, you can always invest the time yourself or find someone who has done it before for hints (or even the solution). I don't see why this would be a problem for anyone to do.
I have literally spent more than an 100 hours on my scripts, and I feel that I should be entitled to the benefits of this, especially since I spent hours and hours learning how to write scripts in general, then spent hours and hours testing my scripts in game to get them to work correctly.
Let me give you an idea of the complexity of what I have done (in CMUDPro):
1. I have completely mapped (via my client) an area that I know to be full of herbs.
2. In certain rooms of the map, I have set the "next room" location, so that the client knows where to herb next (when you can't travel any more in a particular direction).
3. There are triggers to handle all the alternate messages to "There is no obvious exit".
4. There are triggers to handle the fact that many times there are no obvious exits (when on a plain or something).
4. I have multiple variables that list which herbs are good or bad and which are ambiguous.
5. I have variables (which I reset each armageddon) that keep track of all the rooms where I found a particular herb.
6. I have a function which predicts the plural name of any given herb (you'd be surprised how difficult this particular function is).
7. I have a set of aliases that allows me to quickly tell the client whether I'm looking for any and all herbs, or just a particular one.
8. Etc, etc, etc...
So, you would think with all these powerful triggers that took hours and hours to develop, that gathering herbs would be an easy task, but since the locations of herbs in many areas is completely random each armageddon cycle, gathering herbs is still a wholly time consuming task.
As a member of my particular guilds, I need a number of different types of herbs, so each armageddon cycle, Earth has to roam one particular area over and over again, looking for different herbs. For example in one area, it takes about 40 minutes to cover a whole area. So if I'm looking for 6 different types of herbs, it will take 6 x 40 minutes = 4 hours to get a map of where certain herbs can be found.
Now, at least for me, once this is done, I can gather herbs fairly quickly (1.5 hours) to get all 6 different types of herbs from all locations it can be found in this particular area. I can't imagine what others do without the extra 'assistance' of the client. For others, it would probably take much longer.
Realize, that this is all time where I could be grinding or doing something else. Also, if I don't log in once per Armie, I hit the RobeLim, and lose all my herbs. During this time, the general exp is minimal, so the benefit is not realized until combat, and even then, it's limited by mana to cast spells and the time limit to actually use the herbs directly.
Don't hate the scripters. At least I personally try to script so I can get all the mundane tasks out of the way so I can spend time actually enjoying the game. Though, these days, spending hours and hours herbing before I gain any benefit feels as limiting as logging in to find empty racks.